LONDON — You've bought the tickets, you've planned the trip, and you've packed the perfect wardrobe.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, you could join the thousands of travellers each year who land at their destination without their bags. And unfortunately, the sad reality is some people and their luggage are never reunited.

But Luna Laboo's website — www.isthisyourluggage.com — may help some travellers find their long-lost belongings.

Laboo photographs and posts online the contents of lost luggage she's bought at auction in hopes the owners will see them.

And in the process she's seeing something, too.

" I keep saying the photographs I have of all the luggage are like portraits of the people, but in a bit of a different way," Laboo said.

"I just want to make them look beautiful and it's the humanity in the portraits that makes me want to get them back to the people who own them."

It was the disastrous opening of Heathrow's Terminal 5 in London last spring that gave Laboo the idea.

She had been watching news reports of the thousands of bags piling up during the terminal's first week of operation. At one time, more than 20,000 bags were "lost" in the system. While the majority of bags eventually found their owners, airlines generally only spend three or four months searching.

If the owner can't be found by then, the bags are sent to auction. Money raised goes to charities.

Enter Luna.

"I went along not really intending to buy one but couldn't help myself. And then, taking it and waiting to open it all the way home was really exciting. And I knew it was just going to be full of other people's dirty laundry, but it was still really exciting that there might be something in there that was a bit more interesting", Laboo said.

Laboo has been storing the bags in the cavernous basement of a British office tower. The Londoner has bought 11 lost cases. The first was completely on a whim, and Laboo admits she was just curious to see what she would find inside.

"Maybe I'm just really nosy, looking through other people's stuff. But you know, when you go round to a friend's house and they've got their wardrobe doors open and you can just see it and think oh, that's quite pretty", Laboo giggles.

Like the young girl's case with 10 pairs of balled socks.

"But when you opened them up they weren't with the right pair, but there was the right sock within other balls of socks. So it was almost like she'd balled her socks at speed or she just didn't care there were off socks. There were two socks and that was good enough."

Or the woman's case Laboo has that contains hiking pants, a waterproof jacket and a kinky nurse's uniform.

Of that, she says: "It was obviously like an outward bound weekend she'd gone on with somebody and she wanted to take a naughty nurse outfit along — at least that's what I like to think."

Laboo is using her imagination to create a profile of each owner, because there is nothing left in the case by the time she gets it, to identify anyone. The airlines remove any photos or documentation, before passing the bag on.

But, the more cases Laboo buys, the more she realizes she'd like to find the owners.

And she figures she'll know them, when she hears them.

"There's things that you can't see in the images, even the higher (resolution) images of the labels and the sizes of the clothes. And I have another way I've been plotting that I could kind of work out, but I can't tell you because then people will know and they can cheat. So I do have a secret plan."

Until then, from a woman who is now an expert on lost luggage — a tip.

Write your name and number on the "inside" of your case — or it might end up here as well.

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